Ubiquitous QR codes provide instant info

Sunday

Dec 16, 2012 at 6:00 AM

Bob and Joy Schwabach ON COMPUTERS

QR codes are doorways to other places. As you go through this newspaper, you will likely see some of these codes, square in shape and filled with dots and squiggly lines. Take a snapshot of them using your smartphone or tablet app for reading QR codes and they open to something else.

A nice example of their use recently was in Central Park, New York City. Printed QR codes were placed on posts around the park. When users scanned them with their smartphones, they got information about movie scenes shot at that spot, complete with clips from the movie. Sort of puts you in the picture. This can be done anywhere, of course, telling the story of a particular place. A little background music, please.

Increasingly it’s a QR world. This may be as much news to you as it was to us, since we never noticed them creeping up. When a giant QR code appeared in front of our apartment building several years ago, informing us of heaven knows what, we couldn’t read it. The app we used to scan it back then didn’t work, so we gave up. But now we know more. If you’ve got an Android phone, use the free “QR Droid.” If you’ve got an iPhone use the free “Zapper.” More info on both is at QRdroid.com.

QR Droid is a free app you can use to get a lot more than links to video clips and information. Besides viewing QR codes, it lets you create them automatically. For example, you can create one that contains information on how you can be reached. So the next time you’re asked for a business card, you can hand one over, or let your new contact scan the QR code instead. If they scan it, all the information goes straight into their phone. If they just have your card, they may or may not bother to input the information into their phone or computer.

QRDroid has a variety of other codes you can create — should you be feeling creative. There are event codes, for instance, that automatically add events to your friends’ calendars when they scan the box, and a code that zooms in to a YouTube video or any other website as soon as they scan it.

We started small, scanning the QR code on an ad in the newspaper, and then moved on to a Coke bottle and found out about sales on Diet Coke. The best scan was a QR code from Popular Science magazine. It produced a video of a new gyroscopic screwdriver that could tell whether you wanted to tighten or loosen, depending how you held your hand.

Dropbox is a free program from dropbox.com, and probably the most popular way to store and/or share large files; they let you store up to two gigabytes for free. But Gmail now lets you insert an attachment up to 10 gigabytes. That’s 400 times larger than Gmail’s previous limit for attachments. You need to have stored it in Google Drive. From the Gmail window, click “Drive.”

According to a survey by TeamViewer, 67 percent of working Americans say they’d wear a T-shirt and jeans if they worked from home. One percent said they’d wear a suit and tie. (Those must be the “one percent” we’re always reading about.)

Seventy-three percent said getting to wear what you want makes you more productive. Eighty percent said it would sure save on gas. And over a third said they’d be glad to be away from office gossip.

•If you’re stuck for a last-minute holiday present, a photo may be the way to go. Joy gave her sister a canvas print of her sons in a frame, from SnapBoxPrints.com. It cost her $17 for an 8-by-10 in a frame. Other sizes start at $9.79. Shipping is free if you take delivery at a CVS pharmacy. Bob didn’t think the print was museum quality, but Joy liked it.

•For odd last-minute gift ideas, we went to DailyGrommet.com. It shows videos of new products. “My Cup of Cake” was something different: The gift is a cup with ingredients. Add milk or water, stir, pop in the microwave, and you have a chocolate or caramel cake in a cup.

Advanced Mobile Care from iObit is a free app to prevent problems on your Android smartphone. It blocks malware, helps games run smoothly, locks private photos and videos, kills memory-hogging apps and extends battery life. It also helps you uninstall apps and sort them by name, size or frequency of use.

TeamSnap is free for Android or iPhone and is used by more than 125,000 teams around the world. It lets coaches add and remove players, change lineups and schedule or cancel games. There’s also an online version for computers. The app is used in 177 countries and for more than 100 sports.

Your skin can vibrate when a call comes in, if Nokia’s patent on “smart tattoos” becomes a commercial reality. You can program different vibrations for different callers. A printed circuit that reacts to the magnetic field produced by incoming calls can be worn as a stick-on or tattooed directly on someone’s skin, using ferro-magnetic ink. (We think we saw this movie.)

We never liked the name “Hotmail,” Microsoft’s cloud-based email service. So we were glad when they recently changed the name to Outlook.com. Now Microsoft is reporting that a third of new users are ex-Gmail users. In a survey, Microsoft found that users like Outlook’s cleaner design, spam blocking and the ease at which you can share photos and Office documents.

As soon as we logged on to try it, however, we saw that around 20 spam emails had been sent as if they were from us. We immediately changed our security question and our password, which had been previously set up for a Windows Live account. Oh well, back to Gmail.